Wednesday, June 04, 2008

As history teaches us, the ingenuity of the human mind to find justifications for its actions on the basis of abstract ideals which it considers authoritative is endless. Muslims are no different than anyone else in that regard. But of course, a movement which has become called political Islam does exist and it involves people who use Islam as an instrument towards certain political ends. Some of those groups are pushed towards more radical means of achieving their ends. This is result of factors within the affected countries in which the balance within the struggle to use the emblem of Islam has tilted towards governments, at least temporarily. That use can be quite limited as in Egypt or all encompassing as in the case of Afghanistan. But in doing so, there is created the space for ever more revolutionary uses of the notion of political Islam, in the absence of any other ideology and in the successful taming of public sentiment by governments in their own use of the Islam as a symbol of identity. In sum, Political Islam is obviously a volatile force, the result of internal community dynamics upon the stage of global politics